It’s been a rough few years for the Ivy League, whose schools have seen campus unrest, anti-Semitism, and hostility to free speech, alongside the shouting down of a federal judge, plagiarism, and other untoward-behavior allegations against leadership, capped off by an embarrassing congressional hearing. Elite private universities have not exactly covered themselves in glory.
Nevertheless, their defenders insist, the elite schools still produce America’s leaders. Of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices, seven earned undergraduate degrees and eight earned law degrees from an Ivy. Each of the five presidents before Joe Biden had at least one Ivy degree. Recent research by economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman argued that “Ivy+” schools (the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) contribute a disproportionate share of America’s elite.
While graduates of those schools have indeed left their mark on some parts of American life—accounting for “more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century,” per the researchers—at the state level, other universities play a much larger role.
That was the result of my new study of a wide array of public leaders’ educational backgrounds. Today, governors, state supreme court justices, attorneys general, state legislative leaders, and state education chiefs are likelier to have gone to public universities than to private ones; likelier to have gone to a school in their states than one outside; and, perhaps most notably, likelier to have gone to public flagships than to Ivy+ institutions. These findings held at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The path to leadership in most states runs through key in-state universities, which are typically public but sometimes private. According to my review, two-thirds of governors and legislative leaders attended in-state colleges. In 17 states, 80 percent or more of the supreme court’s justices have an in-state undergraduate degree. In 11 states, every supreme court justice graduated from a public law school; by contrast, no sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice did. In total, these public leaderswere more than twice as likely to have earned an undergraduate degree from a flagship public than from an Ivy+ school.
Notably, Ivy+ graduates are relatively scarce among most states’ top public leadership. In 18 states, none of the officials studied had an Ivy+ undergraduate degree. In another ten states, the proportion of top public leadership with such a degree was 10 percent or less. In fact, a small handful of states have the largest shares of the Ivy+ grads in leadership roles; for instance, 30 percent or more of these officials in New York, California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts are Ivy+ graduates. Perhaps the national higher-education conversation focuses on these elite schools because many of those leading the discussion live in the few places where these institutions are of outsize importance.
My review included not only state-level governing leaders, but an important part of the private sector: each state’s top law firms. I looked at the educational backgrounds of 2,500 lawyers—managing partners, executive committee members, and other leaders of firms recognized as elite in their states. The results were similar. In 44 states, these attorneys were most likely to have attended a public college as undergraduates; in 48 states, their top school was in-state. The same held among law schools: in 44 states, these attorneys’ most-attended law school was an in-state institution; in 36 states, it was a public flagship. These leading lawyers were four times likelier to get a law degree from a flagship public than an Ivy+ (44 percent to 11 percent). As with state governing leaders, only a few states’ major-law-firm leaders came largely from Ivy+ schools—again, including those in California, Massachusetts, and New York.
The media’s focus on a small set of elite privates fails to spotlight the work of two other types of schools. First, it ignores public universities, especially flagships. Indeed, according to my research, the Universities of Texas, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Wyoming educated more public officials than did most Ivy+ schools. Second, it sidelines the impressive performance of many non-Ivy+ privates, such as Brigham Young, Creighton, Willamette, St. Olaf, Suffolk, University of Denver, and Seton Hall, which are producing many American leaders.
If we better understood the role of non–Ivy League schools in developing our leaders, we wouldn’t pay as much attention to the events at a handful of elite campuses. Instead, we might better appreciate the long-unheralded work of America’s public colleges and universities, and that of smaller, oft-forgotten private schools.
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